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Cloth was cut accordingly, staff girded themselves and everyone got on with it. These days though?

It’s no longer just the inevitable and deserved consequence of a bad season.

It’s a sinkhole to another world, a dark, doom-laden crater with sheer cliffs and a one-way arrow pointing to the depths of hell.

Listen to the language used – job losses, budgetary black holes. It’s about survival, not revival.

A healthy fear of failure is one thing but clubs are now haunted by its potential consequences. And that has to change. On the surface, the game looks in a really decent place right now.

Celtic at the peak of their powers, an unmissable soap opera at Rangers with a new leading man, Aberdeen still intent on putting them to shame, Hearts and Hibs with limelight-loving gaffers and chips on all shoulders, even Killie with a manager of the year and a summer’s recruitment ahead of him.

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But when everyone else is looking over their shoulder at what they believe is an abyss then that can’t be healthy.

Thistle may or may not go down today – although if even a fraction of the tension Alan Archibald displayed on Thursday gets to his players, they almost certainly will. He was Viagra-rigid.

There’s a reason for that. He knows the price.

So did Stuart Kettlewell as Ross County went down. All the right words were coming out of his mouth but he looked a haunted man.

So when did this happen? The day greed was allowed to become the driving force. The day they set up the Self Preservation League 20 years ago. It may have changed names but its principles remain forged in the cowardice of its instigators.

The We’re-Alright-Jack breakaway which turned a crossing into a chasm and dynamited the bridge.

All you have to do is look at what has happened since. Yo-yo teams stopped yo-yoing. They stayed down.

Dunfermline, a basket case. Falkirk, no way back for eight years. Raith? Down two flights and stuck on the landing like a concussed drunk. Morton the same, clawing their way back inch by inch.

Mark Warburton and Neil Lennon both had to work hard to get their teams out of the second tier

Even clubs with massive resources have toiled. Hibs threw the kitchen sink at it for three years and crawled back over the line. Rangers didn’t get out at the first time of asking. Look at the nick of Dundee United – in a tailspin.

Now both Highland clubs are there for the first time in close to a decade.

And all the motivation Thistle should need today is across the park from them in Livingston, a club who have been third in the top flight and League Cup winners but were built on such shifting sands that they’ve gone through two administrations, a series of charlatan owners and all four divisions to get back to where they’re standing now.

Still impoverished but defying odds. They’re where they are on the miracle playing budget of barely £250,000.

Yet ask Inverness, ask United, ask County, what the price of going down is and they’ll tell you there’s an instant black hole of £1.5million – and that’s just the start of the bleeding.

Livingston could be heading back to the big time but being a fan of the Lions has been a rollercoaster ride in recent years

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We interviewed St Johnstone’s owner Stevie Brown back in January and even he talked about it. A club who had spent the previous six years in the top six yet were still living in complete dread of the effects of a single bad year.

It’s time to start thinking about how to rebuild the bridge to make the highway to hell less of a season ticket on a one-way ride.

The obvious answer is a bigger top division. But when Neil Doncaster tells us the set-up is the “least unacceptable” and they’re still not motivated enough to fix it, what chance them coming up with a plan to make a 16 or an 18 work?

So maybe it’s baby steps for now. Maybe it’s two up, two down, with play-offs – if there’s more chance of a return ticket, there’s less chance of relegation being the Armageddon it is. Either way, something has to give.